Jeb mulled over how the demon girl had ever locked onto him. It must have been that sympathetic smile he offered her back in Camden. He grasped for one last bluff. “Back behind this house is nothing but woods. I'll tie you up, you and your whining brother and sister, throw you in a hole. You Want to see a killer. I'll give you a good taste.” He took another drink, closed his eyes, and waited.
Willie flew off the porch and hied over a crackling stalk of last fall's mums. Wet at the mouth, he banged on the truck door. “Ida May. We got to run off. This man, he's wild, like Uncle Jack's ace of spades. Now get your hindend up ‘fore I drag it out!”
“Your brother, now he got some sense. How about you, Angel? Am I going to have to throw you all down in those woods?” Jeb had a pocketknife he used for peeling apples. He drew it out and showed it to her.
“Go ahead, then! Cut my throat,” she said.
“I Will.”
“Do it! You can't make me cry.”
“Hold still.” He wrapped his right hand around the back of her neck.
“No, please, Lord, save my sister! We know she ain't right, but save her anyway!” Willie fell to his knees.
Ida May's feet went down and her head appeared. A piercing soprano scream, like a young rabbit in a snare, split the quiet pastoral woodland.
“Willie got hisself religion, Angel. How about you? You a praying little gal?” He pressed his fingers around the sides of her neck. For a moment, he felt a notion rise, like he could snap her in two.
“You won't do it, I'll bet.” Her voice quivered.
Jeb held her neck so hard she grimaced. He lost himself. That was the only thing he could blame on bringing the tip of his pocketknife close to her throat, just like he had took old Hank Hampton down.
“They'll find you. You'll be strung up,” Angel said. Her face was softer, more childlike.
Thunder trailed from the southeast, from Texas. A black veil, thin but threatening, curtained the eastern rim beyond the hills. Jeb smelled rain. The knife tip touched Angel's skin. Her bottom lip tucked under the top lip like an envelope.
“I'll take you into tows; let you ask around about your sister. If you find another way to get to her or if you don't, I don't care. You're not my charges. Ain't my responsibility. You think I know how to care for you kids? I don't, so don't be looking at me with those big sad ones of yours. I'm not the one to get you where you need to be.”
“We're not riding with you no more!” Willie charged up onto the porch and into the house. “Let's go, Angel! He's a crazy, done got let loose from the looney house.”
Angel rubbed the pink markings around her throat. “I knew you couldn't do it. Let's take some of that stuff from out of the back. We can fix us a bite to eat then go into town. Don't look at me like that, Willie. I know what I'm doing. Bring Ida May inside. We're having us a dinner.”
Jeb watched Angel lead the other two around, a miniature of her momma, most likely, parroting older women in the kitchen.
She found a box that shook with a few matches. She asked Willie to heft Jeb's big iron skillet onto the top burner while she-diced up potatoes. Once the potatoes sizzled nicely in a dollop of lard, the girl stirred up a pan of bread and got it ready to cook inside the oven. She took several trips to the truck and back before she addressed him again. “We need milk for the little one.”
“You see a cow around here? I'll go see if your sister's old man dug her a well. Water's just as good.” He wanted her to disappear from his life, but the potatoes smelled enticing. He figured she was good for at least one meal. He glanced over at Willie, staring hard at him from the corner.
“I guess water will have to do. Maybe in town we'll find someone with milk for Ida May. She has weak bones, and my momma always fussed after her with milk.”
“You keep coddling her like that and she'll never grow up,” said Jeb. “I don't know much about kids, but I know you treat a kid like a baby and they'll grow up to be a whining complainer of a person—no good to anybody.”
“You right, Jeb Nubey. You don't know nothing about kids. My sister nearly died when she was born. That's why she's so small. Doc said she needed to be kept on lots of milk and meat every few days or so. I know those things about her. I don't need no advice taking care of my sister.”
“That's what you tell yourself, ‘cause you just a kid. Makes you feel bigger than yourself to think you can take care of Ida May. But truth is you don't know nothing more than me on raising that kid. If I hadn't of come along, what would you have done then? I can answer that for you. You would have starved like everybody else in Arkansas.”
The kitchen was all grease and dust, a mash that smelled of old biscuit batter and milk gone bad. Jeb lit the fire inside the oil stove that had just enough kerosene for one night's worth of cooking. Angel slid the pan of cornmeal batter into the warming oven. “Don't know how this'll taste without milk,” she said.
The sun had stopped shining through the glass. The storm from the east obstructed the glow of evening that settled on the outskirts of Nazareth. Night came early.
“Let's put this grub out and get to business. I don't plan on staying here all night. I'll be gone before tomorrow.” Jeb opened the door to the rear porch to allow some of the smoke hissing from the overhead stovepipe to escape.
“You only got two plates,” said Angel.
“One for me. One for all of you. I never said I was set up for company.” Jeb watched her pile extra potatoes onto the plate. Finally the bread browned. He used an old shirt to pull the cornbread from the oven. The hot iron branded his hand through the shirt.
Angel seated herself, Willie, and Ida May near the door where the air was fresher. She had a nervous shake, a way that she tossed her head to make her too-long bangs part around her eyes. Often throughout the meal, she passed the plate back and forth between Willie and Ida May, tossing her head between the feedings. Her fingers, like everything about her, were long and brown. She might have been taught the way of grace had her mother stayed longer. Whenever she lifted her spoon to her lips, she did not eat with the same ravenous air as her siblings. Instead, she paused, a fraction of a pause that gave her the chance to study what she was about to ingest. Then she lifted the spoon as though she lifted a butterfly poised on her black little fingertips and tentatively deposited the food into her mouth. After that, she chewed as though every morsel gave her something to think about.
“I need to know what you think your plans might be if you can't find hide nor hair of this sister, Claudia. If you got it in your head I'm the passage back to your daddy or wherever you plan to go, you got some refiguring to do.” The potatoes tasted fair to Jeb, something like what the cook fixed back at the cotton plantation, only without onion.
“Why you care what we do next?” Angel showed Ida May how to use the corner of her sleeve to wipe her mouth.
A wind blew in through the screens and across the porch, a cool breeze that smelled as though it had traveled from Alaska.
“We going to have us a storm again all right,” said Willie.
“Even if it rains, we're going into Nazareth.” Jeb wanted no more nonsense out of the Welbys. They were trouble enough in good weather, let alone the dead weight they would be in the bad.
“Good folks won't be out. We won't find a soul out in bad weather.” Angel told Ida May to finish the last spoonful of potatoes. She nudged the bread in her sister's direction, too.
“Grab your gear. We're leaving now,” said Jeb. “Don't dally. And you, Biggest, don't give me none of your looks. You must not have been slapped enough by your daddy or else you'd be respectful like girls is supposed to be.”
“We're still eating,” said Angel. “Ida May, you go on and finish your supper.”
Jeb blew out a sigh. “Girl, don't you hear a thing I say? We're leaving now!” When he grabbed her plate, she held onto it. He yanked it. When she let go he could see the spark in her eyes. The greasy plate smacked up against his shirt. “Get your scabby selve
s out to the truck or I'll kick you all the way out there myself.”
Angel marched. Her arms swung back and forth along with the legs that she straightened as though she marched on stilts, flouting his instructions. “How we going to have our food settle now? You carry on like your momma never said nice things to you.”
“Mr. Jeb Nubey, I think I ought to say something right about now,” said Willie.
“Say it on the way into town then.”
“That's the thing, you see. We just lost our ride into town. See them fellers out in your truck? I think they's leaving with all your good belongings.” Willie lifted a shiny finger and pointed through the front door.
“What fellers?” Jeb pushed the boy out of the way. A curtain of black sky blew wet wind across the porch. He slid out and leaped onto the overgrown grass and saw the truck lights brighten the rain that he could only feel smacking his face. “You, come back here! Those is my things!”
A big slack-jawed youth not older than his own brother drew his face back into the cab, laughing. “We's just borrying it for a while, brother!” The thief manning the steering wheel gunned the engine just as Jeb reached the street. He chased them until the rain stung like mosquitoes. On and on he went, until his breath was long gone and his legs turned to rubber. His scalp was soaked. He heard breathless cries running up behind him.
“I see him!” Willie yelled. “Here, standing out in the rain.”
“I'll say this for you, Jeb Nubey: you got some legs that can run. We thought we'd never catch you,” said Angel. “We better call the police.” Ida May finally chewed the potato she had saved in the side of her mouth.
“They took my rifle—my best hunting rifle! My hat. I never go without my hat.” Jeb counted off every possession according to importance.
“Who cares about your stupid hat? What about the food? How we going to get into town now? How'd those boys take your truck, anyway? I'll bet you left the keys in it,” said Angel.
“Hush it or I'll hush you with my bare hands.” The wind hit Jeb smack in the face. “This is a bad one. Feels like the skirts of a Oklahoma sooner.” He did not know if the Welby children heard him or not. The rain and wind howled, the ghost of wood and earth aroused by the tempest.
“Let's get back to Claudia's old house. At least inside her place we got a dry floor to sleep on until morning.”
“You go back, take these two with you,” said Jeb. “I'm going ahead. I'll find those two drunks plowing through the mud down one of these old roads and I'll nab them. Probably from around here, looking for trouble.”
“We're going with you,” said Angel. “You know how far we run after you? I'll never lead us back by myself.”
Jeb wanted them to lose their way. But Ida May set to wailing. He heard his baby sister's cry again. “Foller me through the woods, if you have to. But I won't wait a step for any of you so you better move it like ducks behind they momma. We'll take the higher ground but foller the road alongside it. Maybe the woods will keep back some of the rain.”
Rain plummeted to the leafy forest bed, still rotting the leaves from the past autumn. The woods smelled green to Jeb, like the marsh was given its daily drink offering from the sky. But the thunder and the jagged knives of lightning pounded the winds from the tattered sky. The pines in the forest bent to the flouncing skirts of the storm. A seventy-year-old oak snapped off at the top about fifty feet from where they stood.
Angel shouted for Ida May to keep up.
Jeb slowed down in such away to allow the vagabond trio to keep up but not in a way to make them think he cared a hill of beans about them. He didn't.
Blackness enveloped the last of the day. He had to rely on the sporadic lightning bolts to illuminate the road. The sodden trunks, black and dripping wet all the way through the backside of the bark, disappeared into the velvet black backdrop of stormy evening. Twice Jeb missed hurling himself straight into a thick trunk. The wind swirled freely and dogged them whenever they hit a clearing. Jeb thought he smelled a tornado. When three large oaks dominoed one against the other, he knew he'd surely seen the tail winds of a bad one.
Lightning spit across the wall of rain and reflected against glass—two windows staring, blinking. “I don't know what I see. Maybe it's a house. Foller me this way.”
As he led them toward nothingness, a bell sounded, tolling in the wind. He knew the sound and said, “It's a church!” The rainy twinkle of skylights illuminated the steeple, a white spire that glowed under the arc of lightning then fell gray again. Jeb ran up the front steps. Two doors hinged on each side and met in the middle, a heavy offering of hand-hewn timber locked on the inside with something as unmovable as a squared timber against iron holdings. “They bolted this door but good. Ain't no use trying to get inside.”
“Let's try a window. Anything!” Out front, Angel made Willie bend over and give her a foot up. She pushed against the glass. “It's hard to open, but I swear it ain't locked.”
“Out of the way then!” Jeb pushed against the window frame, joggled it back and forth until it slid an inch. He repeated the motion until the window opened. He grabbed the boy. “You're going in first. I'll hand you the littlest and you help her over the windowsill.” He pushed Willie through the opening, rump, last. He and the boy helped Ida May through the open window.
“Just a foot up, then,” said Angel, who stood away from him.
“We're out in a tornado! Get yourself over here.” He grabbed her and lifted her through the opening. She was lighter than he assessed and she went through too fast and thudded onto the floor. He ignored the way she screeched and with one arm pulled himself inside.
“You know you won't never find a woman treating them bad like you do!” Angel lifted her skirt and examined the yellowing bruise on her shin. “Not a good woman, not one that wants to do for you and bless your house.”
Jeb lit the two lanterns with matches left on the windowsill by some blessed soul. “I don't know what you're jawing about, Biggest. Crawl up off that old dusty floor onto that pew by your brother and Littlest and get some rest. I need some time to myself.” His eyes ran past the bruise again. “Did that happen when you came through yonder winder?”
Angel inhaled and blew put an impetuous little huff like a mare he once had that never took to its breaking. Her face turned to one side and she nodded obliquely.
“Look, I'm, sorry. You satisfied? I don't think about being all polite and ‘scuse, me, ma'am’ and ‘may I help you here through yon winder’ when I'm about to get sucked away by a tornado.”
“I never saw no tornado.”
“You ever been to Oklahoma?”
Angel shook her head again, still showing the narrowed eyes that said she mistrusted him.
“In Oklahoma you know they's a tornado before it's upon you if you use your God-given horse sense. The whole air around you changes and you can feel something invisible pressing against the insides of your ears. That tells you, ‘Hey, fool! Get yourself under the bed or down in the cellar.’ I'm telling you I know a tornado. I once had a uncle lived in Oklahoma.”
“They probably want you up in Oklahoma and Texas too, for killing somebody.” She had lost all of her fight and sat down on the pew.
“What about you, Biggest? You on the run? You a runaway?”
“Stop calling me that.”
“It fits. You got the biggest everything—mouth, eyes, big ears.” He saw that got to her.
Angel touched both earlobes. “My granny says I got blessed ears. I can hear every little thing. Things that other people miss, I hear.”
Jeb thumped the pew wood. “This'll be hard sleeping.”
“Granny always talked about God and things being blessed. I didn't mind it. Daddy minded it some. Momma plain old made fun. But Momma is wise, too. They just had differences, my momma and Daddy's momma.”
“Your granny a Bible thumper?”
“In a big way, big-time way. She could out-quote the preacher from Snow Hill and he is the bi
ggest Bible thumper I know of.”
“I think you should stay with your granny. Sounds like she could teach you a thing or two.”
“She died. Last year.”
“I'm sorry about it.”
“Before she left us, she told me privately that heaven was just another country and that we would all be together again some day. So we visit when I sleep and she sees me when I dream. Granny's not gone.”
“Where'd you say your ma is?”
“Little Rock. I think she wants to be a nurse. They make good money. When she gets everything lined out, I'll go back with her. Daddy's got some confusion.”
“If your ma up and left, she must have some confusion herself.”
“Don't say that! Lana said trash about her and it weren't true.”
“Lana is?” He had already forgotten.
“The tramp that was ‘posed to take us to Claudia's but left us and run oft. I don't know where. Once she talked about a place called Kennicut. I'm glad she's gone. Now she won't be sniffing around our place trying to steal Daddy's heart. That was all that was wrong with my momma. It was all Lana.”
The wind outside the church squealed and whistled like a kettle going off.
“Biggest, you do a lot of blame-laying. I guess nobody ever told you that. Sounds like nobody's been tending to your upbringing. But you got all your family's troubles tied up in all the wrong boxes, every one of them labeled with the wrong name.”
“Maybe no one told you nothing, neither. You don't know how to stay out of other folk's business, Jeb Nubey.”
Littlest raised up. Her eyelids tucked slightly up from the centers, enough to show her irises fallen into the bottom lids, unable to focus. She fell back asleep. Willie snored in soft purrs that blew the smallest dark tendrils around his little sister's ear, making a sleeper's smile across her face. His stomach made slight fighting noises, like bats in a cave.
Fallen Angels Page 5
